http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
ALMOST AS AN AFTERTHOUGHT, Bill Clinton made an apology the other day that deserved more
notice than it got. I know, an apology from Bill Clinton isn't exactly a novelty. Our president
has spent much of the past year apologizing. But this one sounded different: natural,
uncalculated, a kind of aside. Maybe that's why it had the ring of the genuine about it.

But that's not the only reason attention should be paid. Because the American president was
apologizing for, he was recognizing, an attitude that was not his alone as the Balkan
bloodletting went on year after year. Indeed, it's not so much an attitude as a basic American
instinct in foreign policy.

The instinct is our natural isolationism -- our reflexive aversion to becoming involved in others'
affairs. Which figures. This is a nation of immigrants, and we didn't leave the old world behind
to stay involved with its blood feuds. That's just what many of us came here to escape.

No matter how many entangling alliances our diplomats make, and they've been making them
ever since there was a United States of America, there is something in the national character
that would just as soon not be part of the rest of the world, thank you. It goes with being a
frontier society, no matter how well settled it becomes.

How were we to know that foreign entanglements would prove inescapable? Wendell Willkie
called it One World, and today we speak of the global economy. Yet the happy delusion
persists that somehow America can avoid Europe's quarrels. The result: Twice this century
we've been unable to keep European brushfires from growing into worldwide conflagrations,
and being drawn in.

Talking to a group of veterans earlier this year, a president who awoke only tragically late to
the dangers of a dismissive attitude toward the Balkans spoke openly about his misjudgment:

There are those who say Europe and its North American allies have no business
intervening in the ethnic conflicts of the Balkans. They are the inevitable results, these
conflicts, according to some, of centuries-old animosities, which were unleashed by the end
of the Cold War restraints in Yugoslavia and elsewhere. I myself have been guilty of saying
that on an occasion or two, and I regret it now, more than I can say....

We do no favors to ourselves or the rest of the world when we justify looking away from this
kind of slaughter by oversimplifying and conveniently in our own way demonizing the whole
Balkans by saying that these people are incapable of civilized behavior with one
another.

If this president minimized how long he managed to dismiss the carnage in the Balkans ("an
occasion or two''), he now has recognized the disastrous consequences since Bosnia erupted
in 1992 -- not just for the millions displaced, the hundreds of thousands killed, the
innumerable victims of brutalities great and small, but for countries far away -- who turn out
to be not be so far away once the flames spread.

Slowly, only slowly, do we learn. And so Kosovo in 1999 did not turn out to be Sarajevo in
1914, or Danzig in 1939: flashpoints for a wider explosion. It didn't happen this time for a
variety of reasons, not least of them overwhelming American power and the willingness,
finally, to use it in concert with our allies.

As Roger Cohen, the New York Times' man in the Balkans, said of Bill Clinton's latest and
too little noted confession: "The president's words will not bring back the dead who perished
in Bosnia as the West waved away the slaughter with that long pervasive and dismally
dismissive phrase, `This is the Balkans, you know.' The Balkans ... have paid a high price for
Bill Clinton's learning curve. Still, his recent words were important.''

Because he has learned. Much remains to be learned -- because the road to peace there will
doubtless be as long and twisting as the road to war has been.

But this much becomes clear: Europe is much too important, much too volatile, to be left to
the Europeans. We've made that mistake before. More than once. Yet we were again slow
to learn it in this decade.

Did we really think that Slobodan Milosevic would not activate his grand plan to terrorize
Kosovo as soon as he could? Did we really think, in the absence of forces on the ground,
that we could prevent it? Did we think at all? Leaders who have lived all their lives in the 20th
century were still underestimating a tyrant's capacity for sheer brutality. And man's.

The lesson may not have been learned yet; the increasingly desperate dictator could still turn
on Montenegro even as his people rally against him. Those ground forces are still needed.
And not just because of instability in the Balkans. Russia falls deeper into its Weimar Period,
wobbling ever more erratically, making threats abroad as it crumbles at home.

But there are encouraging signs, too. This time the West has held. And it was joined by
countries on Russia's border who would like their future to be a Western one -- Poland,
Hungary, Romania. ... The century that fell apart in the Balkans is ending with a show of unity
and determination right where the whole, century-long disaster began: in the Balkans.

Not without reason, Sidney Hook used to refer to the First World War as "the Second Fall
of Man.'' And when its natural sequels, the Second World War and the Cold War, finally
ended, Daniel Patrick Moynihan said the world could finally tackle the questions the First
War had left unresolved. In Kosovo, we may now have begun, however late, however
haltingly, to do just that. The bloody abyss that has been the 20th century may yet be
bridged.

That's why this presidential aside was so important and encouraging. Each time this century
has delivered another horror, we have vowed: Never again. Maybe this time, we'll mean
it.